


cheers to us (and our not so perfect lives)

by kissmeinnewyork



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Tumblr Prompt, whouffle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 18:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2238858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissmeinnewyork/pseuds/kissmeinnewyork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara Oswald never wanted to go to this crappy school reunion thing, but bumping into fellow past student the Doctor (John Smith) may make this whole evening worthwhile. || whouffle prompt from tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cheers to us (and our not so perfect lives)

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: meeting again at a school reunion. Completely whouffle. Hope you enjoy.

Clara Oswald had literally no desire to go back to her secondary school for some tacky reunion thing—that much she was definitely sure of. She had no desire to watch her fellow ‘classmates’ mill about her old school hall, talking about their well paid jobs and model spouses and their broods of _oh, they’re a handful_ small children. She had no desire to list off her current life choices to people she didn’t like then and doesn’t like even more now and watch them turn their nose up at her and mutter _she hasn’t even got a boyfriend, poor love._ The last thing she wanted was pity from the suburban clichés that used to copy her English homework and she’s thought too idiotic and up-themselves to bother keeping in contact with. Ten years have passed without Clara needing to ‘catch up’ with them and she doesn’t understand the point of feeling to do it now.

However, life hardly ever juddered by in the direction Clara wanted it to, so that was how she ended up bored out of her mind and slightly pissed off in Caliburn High School’s assembly hall, listening to a slightly one-sided conversation with a woman called Sarah who she doesn’t even remember from biology class (apparently).

“Billy’s a handful,” Sarah informs her sincerely, while Clara raises her eyebrow. She wonders how often she’s going to hear that phrase this evening about various children she doesn’t care about. “But such a sweetheart. You know, for my birthday, he made me a box covered in sequins and feathers? He’s so creative.”

“Lovely,” Clara replies, trying to hide a grimace. Sarah gushes on about little Billy and his crazy antics at playgroup, even going to show Clara photographs from her iPhone album of Billy on a slide and Billy on the swings and Billy with chocolate all over his face. Admittedly, he’s as cute as any kid that age, but she doesn’t care enough about Sarah (or even know who she is) to have that much of an emotional impact.

“What about you, Clara?” Sarah pulls her ponytail tighter, putting her iPhone back into her neat little purse. “Are you married? Any children?”

Clara snorts but Sarah shows no recognition at the action, so she has to explain herself. Again. “No, and no. I’m fine on my own.”

And—there it is. The Look. The slight head-tilt and click-of-the-tongue of sympathy, like Clara has just told Sarah that she’s recently lost a very dear pet. Clara resists an eye roll at the reaction—is it so bad to not want to be married and have kids at twenty-six? The way Clara’s sees it, she’s had chance to do what she wants with her life before being tied down to one particular man and she’s never really wanted kids, anyway. Not when she’s got a class full of them to teach on a daily basis.

Then comes the inevitable hand squeeze. The kind you get at funerals. A soft, sympathetic contact paired with utterances of concerned wishes and an equally patronising facial expression that Clara wants to slap it right off her, but she resists for appearances sake and silently seethes inside of herself.

“There’s still time, Clara,” Sarah reminds Clara, like she doesn’t know that already. Clara forces a tight smile. “I’m sure you’ll find happiness one day, even if it’s… Too late for children.”

Oh _God,_ she wants to stab her with the dangerously near packet of cocktail sticks on the refreshment table. Or smash a wine bottle off her head. Although that would be a shameful waste of alcohol which she feels she will need to get through tonight.

“ _Thanks,_ ” Clara says with a tight-lipped smile in hope to hide her internal anger. Sarah nods sincerely like she’s done Clara a massive favour which makes Clara want to jump her even more. Now, all she wants is to get this woman off her back, so she pretends to look over in the distance. “Oh, is that _Cassandra_ over there? Apparently she’s an _actress_ now…”

Sarah’s eyes widen and Clara can see the excitement running through the other woman. It’s kind of pathetic. Sarah makes her apologies about leaving which Clara is glad to accept and soon she’s lost amongst the crowd of people with identical lives, and Clara breathes a sigh of relief. She’s so glad she isn’t like that. What she isn’t so glad about is people feeling sorry for her because of it.

“Wine?” a male voice abruptly breaks from beside her, causing her to judder with shock. He laughs at her response, and Clara knows him straight away. The way his scruffy hair hangs over his eye and the tight shirt and odd bowtie combination. She remembers him.

She grins, accepting the drink graciously. “Thank you. Alcohol is not something I’m willing to turn down right now.”

“You look like you needed it,” he jokes, tipping his head to where Sarah is chatting away to Cassandra (who clearly believes she is too good for this whole shebang). Clara’s glad that she’s not the only non-modern society zombie around here. “Clara Oswald, isn’t it?”

“One and only,” she teases, taking a sip of the wine he’s given her. It warms her from the inside out and makes things look marginally better than they did a few minutes ago. “And you’re John Smith.”

He looks shocked, almost spitting out his drink. Clara’s eyebrow quirks at his peculiar reaction. “Sorry, it’s just—I didn’t think you would remember me.”

Clara nudges him playfully. It’s a contrasting height difference—he’s easily six foot and she’s hardly five—but she doesn’t seem to mind and he doesn’t either. “Of course I remember you! You were in my physics and lit class. Top of the class all the time. I don’t know how you remember _me,_ to be honest. I wasn’t anything special.”

“You were,” he blurts out before he allows his mouth and brain to coordinate, and Clara’s eyes widen coyly. John flushes with embarrassment, running a hand through his unruly brown hair. “I mean—yeah. I thought you were special. Sorry, er… That’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?”

Clara looks up at him and the gentle pink flush of his cheeks and she smiles, seeing the teenage boy at the back of her physics classroom with the daft haircut and the pile of textbooks he used to read for fun. They never really spoke back at school: they were in two distinct and separate friendship groups which literally mean nothing now, and she wishes she had sat in that empty seat next to him when she had the chance. He seems more genuine than any of the people she thought were her friends _now._

“What are you up to now, then?” Clara queries, John’s hands slipping into his pockets. “Bet you’re dead successful. Brainbox.”

John laughs at her comment and his smile makes this whole crappy reunion thing seem worth coming to. He enjoys the teasing, just so he can talk to her. “I’m a doctor. Of physics, I mean. I work at Oxford University now.”

Clara’s impressed, but she didn’t expect anything less. He wasn’t the most popular at school but he had a brain that could easily take down any of the other people in the room with its ability. That was what mattered now. Not who you were then. “I guess I’ll have to call you _Doctor_ now, then.”

John chuckles. “I guess you will.” He pauses, nostalgic grin on his face. His eyes look older than the rest of his face somehow, like he’s seen more than he cares to admit. “What about you, Clara Oswald? Changed any lives recently?”

“Ruined some, maybe, with my horrendous homework schedule,” Clara has a mischievous glint in her eye, “I’m an English teacher. Hopefully better than the one we had here.”

“Oh, _Miss Phelps!_ She was terrible,” John recollects, agreeing, “It’s all well and good having a teacher that’s too strict, but having one who breaks down whenever she’s faced with a class is shameful.”

“How did we pass lit at all,” Clara muses, looking up at him behind her glass. There’s a moment of silence between the two of them, only broken by the gentle burr of nearby boasting, and she realises that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of the night with those other people. She wants to spend the rest of the night with _him._

Clara gives John a knowing look and places her now empty wine glass on the table. John raises an eyebrow, curious at what exactly this small woman is plotting, before she looks around to check that everyone is facing another direction. She bites her lip and grabs the two, unopened bottles of red wine, one in either hand.

John’s face is aghast, not at all reassured by her remarkably smug look. “What the hell are you doing?”

Clara hands him one of the bottles and he latches onto it, still surprised. “Should we skip this horrible meal thing and go on a wander?”

His mouth is still a small ‘o’ of disbelief and his virtually non-existent eyebrows are so far up his head that they almost vanish into his scalp. Clara’s amused, her lips pursed. She’s just as beautiful as he remembers. _So,_ he thinks. _This is what skipping class with Clara Oswald would feel like._

“Yes. God, yes.” He says, without a second thought, and Clara Oswald grabs his wrist and drags him into the hall.

-x-

They end up stalking the hallways of their old school, swigging from the bottles and staring into the tiny classroom windows. It’s not so different from what she remembers. True, some of the rooms have been refurbished with interactive whiteboards and new, less rickety chairs, but the walls are still the same shade of off-white even in the dark and they even find some artwork in the art department that was on display when _they_ were in school.

They eventually find their old physics classroom after climbing up the stairs to the first floor—room A23. They still have the same crumbling gas taps and rows of ancient Bunsen burners lining the back wall. The door, miraculously, is unlocked: so Clara twists the door handle and lets the two of them inside. It’s weird, she thinks, to now be in a place that they last set foot in _ten years ago._

“Do you remember on the first day of Year Ten,” Clara says, fingers tracing along the desk tops. Neither of them switch on the lights so they’re left in darkness—it’s comforting, somehow. To be together in the dark. “When Angie Carter caught her new scarf in the Bunsen burner? And we had to be evacuated?”

The Doctor laughs, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He’s pleasantly drunk: he feels light, and he feels that he can say anything to her. Like he’s always wanted to. “Of course I do. I was her lab partner for two years.”

Clara snorts. She jumps up onto a desk, not even rocking under her weight. Her legs dangle over the side. “Unlucky. Mine was Rory Williams, I think. God—did he finally get with Amy? She was all he could go on about.”

“Yep,” John pops the ‘p’, “They got married. About five years ago.”

“Lovely, yet another wedding I wasn’t invited to,” Clara jokes—she’s not bitter about it. She thinks. “I didn’t see them through there.”

John necks back more wine, leaving the taste of mahogany and grape in his mouth. It masks the bitterness that comes with their names. “They moved to New York. I don’t see them anymore.”

The seriousness that follows the statement is abrupt and unexpected, so much so that Clara stops drinking to study him. He’s less stiff, his posture curved, but that’s just the alcohol loosening him up—there’s something else. There’s always something else. “You could go and visit them.”

“No—I couldn’t,” John admits to Clara’s confusion. Her eyebrows furrow and her lips curve into a frown. There’s no use in secrets now, really. Not with Clara Oswald. “I—I was married, to a close friend of theirs, and then she died. I don’t think they could look at me the same way after that.”

Oh. _Oh._ That’s not exactly what she was expecting and— “You were married?”

He smiles, but it’s a smile that’s hiding so much. She worries his face will crack like porcelain. “Yeah. Long time ago now and it was… Difficult. A difficult relationship. We were very different people. She died in an archaeology accident. That’s what she was. An archaeologist.” He pauses. “You don’t mind me telling you this, do you?”

Clara edges round the classroom to reach him. She perches on the desk beside him and her hand squeezes his thigh, comfortingly, and her smile is one he never knew he was waiting for. “I don’t mind.”

He chuckles softly, tugging at his earlobe. He can’t believe it’s _Clara Oswald’s_ hand on _his_ thigh. If sixteen year old him could see him now. “I used to really fancy you in year eleven.”

Clara grins, biting her lip. She looks down at her fingers splayed across his leg. She tilts her head into his chest and the action almost sends him into cardiac arrest, his limbs confused, but in the end he lets his hand smooth over her hair and he feels like a teenager again. “What about now?”

“Given the option, I think I still fancy you. I don’t think I ever stopped fancying you.”

She glances up at him and his eyes are on her lips, and it’s only a matter of moments before she curves her hand round his neck and their mouths collide, hot and slow and welcome. It’s a long time coming for him and unexpectedly perfect for her and—

When they make their way back to the school hall, with his buttons done unevenly and her hair messy, he slips her hand in hers behind his back. They’re not suburban, their lives aren’t spotless and they don’t have a row of immaculate little children who do kid Pilates. But they have each other, after all this time, and that’s more than enough for them.


End file.
